I see you work for Motorola, I wasn’t sure whether they still had people working up there, at least you’re pretty close to work.

How do you find your BB connection, I had a real mare last year – went down for a hellishly long time as BT p++sed around……if you have any problems, I sympathise.

It’s the longevity and the security of those services which puts me off

Of course, if you are just looking for a little online storage, you could always look at http://www.adrive.com who’ll give (yes GIVE) you 50Gb online storage for free.

Not sure what their business model is so not sure on their longevity but it’s a lot of online space for nothing and well worth a look at, IMHO

Feel free to go on all you like, this makes a lot of sense. The RAID 5 was always my first temptation, but it quickly became apparent that an out of the box solution was almost entirely enterprise (there’s definitely a market there to create a home solution for people!).

I could build a 4 disk RAID 5 array quite cheaply, but once I started looking at getting an 8 disk RAID 5 card, the prices shot up. I know Darren has some views on RAID 5 – I just like the theory of being able to rebuild my data.

You make a good point about the cost/benefit ratio, when I started looking at this I found I could almost upsell myself into any solution. But I’ve held back to work out exactly what’s right for me!

As a side note Andy, I think we’ve virtually just become neighbours! lol

Carry out a simple cost/benefit analysis to work out what the risks are, what the costs are and which solution offers the best mix of minimising risk against affordable cost.

With regards to RAID, I always thought that the way data was laid down was to a standard, not in a manner proprietary to the RAID card deployed (yes a hardware RAID solution will ALWAYS outperform a software solution). However, I think that my thoughts may have been tempered by the fact that I never had a controller fail on me and I always bought from the same manufacturer (Adaptec) who were the market leaders a few years ago (when competition was lower) and always offered backwards compatibility and a wide range of SCSI disk connectivity options.

With regards to 3 Vs 4 disk, online spares and hot swaps, my experience is from the enterprise background where down time was costly. However, in terms of reliability I found hard drives to be the least reliable component in a server (fast SCSI drives ran hot) followed by cooling fans, processers (the two kind of go together like a “horse and carriage”) and power supplies so my “typical” server would have a redundant power supply ready to kick in should the primary fail and at least a 4 disk RAID array although hard drives were smaller so a 5 or 6 disk array was more common with one of the disks being an online spare so in the event of one drive failing the online spare would automatically kick-in, the array would self-rebuild and the server monitoring software would send the sysadmin a notification. Then SMART (Self Monitoring and Analysis Reporting Technology) came in and the server was then able to actively monitor the health of the disks and give advance warning of disk failure, allowing preventative maintenance to take over., the sysadmin receiving warning of failure and then swapping out the disk before failure.

However, it’s worth noting that because these were enterprise (or larger small business systems that we always had a tape streamer and enforced a rigorous tape back-up discipline as well. (Belt and braces really)

For a home set up, there are performance benefits of some types of RAID over others, however if it is just to provide data storage and resilience (RAID 5 was never really a back-up solution just a way of joining many drives together to overcome the small disk size of the time) I’d consider RAID 5, look for a controller with SMART and go for 4 drives configured in a 4 drive array. Then, if you need more storage, you can simply add another drive to the array (provided you have the physical space) and allow the array to rebuild itself and include the new drive so a 4 x 500 array would offer 1.5Tb of storage, adding another 500Gb drive would increase that to 2Tb.

Sorry for going on but I hope this makes sense.

But off-site is definately something to be considered, even if you run a 2 week rotation, one disk on your site backing up the NAS one week, then rotate it for the other the next….

The solution mentioned above was for a couple of user network at a Farm, simple but effective.